Hacker News Reader

Eric Ries was Co-Founder and CTO of IMVU which had 4 million active users and $40M in annual revenue at one point.

I assume you knew that and just felt like bashing him without adding any nuance to your point. That's a bad habit and you shouldn't do it.

I'm well aware of that and, to be quite honest, it isn't particularly impressive.

But there is a piece of perspective that is perhaps missing. I've seen him preach to companies that have orders of magnitude more active users and orders of magnitude as much profit as he had revenue. And making people there believe that he somehow knows something about what it takes to make a company successful. To make a successful product.

I've seen companies who had brilliant people who built more business for their company than this guy ever built for himself be told that "why can't you be more like that". Because it is always more attractive for some types of companies to listen to some outside hack than to actually pay attention to unglamorous people with far more potential. It is easier to admire something that comes with a book, ceremonies and eloquent salesmanship. And sadly, it is easier to take what they say seriously.

I've worked on products that had an order of magnitude more users (products you might well have used) and wondered "why am I doing this again?" because at the company I was working, that wasn't really numbers indicative of a successful product.

IMVU is 23 people. It is the equivalent of a mom and pop shop in this context. I'm sure his story is compelling to someone hacking together a product in their spare time and dreaming of doing a startup. But you do need to understand that he has very little to offer to the kinds of companies this cult does real damage to.

Using the numbers you quote (they tend to vary) IMVU has an order of magnitude fewer users than MySpace. MySpace. The graveyard. That's 4 users for every copy of "The Lean Startup" book sold (well, probably fewer since I haven't kept up with his book sales).

IMVU has fewer users than people who've seen Ries talk - live or online.

IMVU is not a notable success.

He is a successful seller of self help books. No doubt about that.

"In contact with large, established organisations this book tends to produce cargo cults. Simplistic management self-help literature combined with institutional mediocrity, stupidity, fear of change, and hard-shelled delusion is a horrible mix."

This has been my experience as well with lean in the enterprise SaaS world. We are currently toying with "design sprints" from Google [1] which is basically a faster version of lean to get to an MVP. I feel that design sprints are tangible and can get a group of people to creatively solve a problem in a short amount of time, however it seems you run into the local maxima hill climbing problem.

1. http://www.gv.com/sprint/

Ries did co-found a company in 2004 and that company is still around (14 years later). It’s not a unicorn, but it’s not dead either: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/imvu

Many good methodologies can develop a cult-like following, not just in tech. The “Innovator's Dilemma” was largely that for business schools and MBAs. It doesn’t mean that you cannot apply the ideas postulated, but nothing is a panacea.

I wouldn't know what role Christensen played for MBAs back when "Innovator's Dilemma" was published since I was strongly disinterested in business back then. But I don't think the two books and the two authors compare.

Having read it and having dealt with a lot of MBAs in "large businesses in areas under disruption pressure"-settings in the last decade I'm not under the impression that it is a book that had much of an effect.

Then again, the average MBA in big business isn't exactly a reader.

> [...] the average MBA in big business isn't exactly a reader.

I've worked with several MBAs in big business[0]. They didn't seem illiterate. What prompts this comment/impression?

[0] FWIW - I prefer them to the average MBA in VC.

Almost a decade working in a large firm where the top 2 to 4 layers of the company (depending on where you are) are almost exclusively people with business degrees. It is no joke. Most don’t keep up.

Hi, I'm new in this community and startup world, when I read eric ries's books I'm in awe and planning to applying it.

But I read about your comment and reconsidering my plan

Anyway can you recommend me some alternatives behind eric ries's way to develop a startup? Thank you

Comments like yours make me react because I feel sorry to see people fall for this kind of manipulations.

Don't be deterred from applying advices that have helped thousands of companies because of an unsubstantiated rant by some guy on HN. His comments (assuming poster is male, apologies if I'm mistaken) are light in arguments and sound more like personal attacks directed specifically at Eric Ries, they don't really address the value of the Lean Startup methodology. The language is strong and bullish in an attempt to sound smart and to rally people to some point. What that point is is left to the reader to figure out.

X is not as successful as Y, therefore X cannot give advice to Y. What kind of logic is that? Counter examples abound, Nick Bollettieri never played tennis professionally but is one of the most acclaimed coaches in the sport. Closer to home, Patrick McKenzie had built a bingo card creator (profitable, while admittedly not an earth shattering success if you go by unicorn standards) when he started giving valuable advices to people and companies "orders of magnitude" more successful.

Also, pinning IMVU, a well established company, against other "orders of magnitude" more popular, more affluent, and also well established companies is not only a fallacious metric for success, but it's not even relevant to discredit the book or the methodology, since we're not even talking about startups anymore. IMVU is 14 years old, it has long outgrown the advices in the book. Most founders know that one of the first biggest challenges for a startup is to survive and grow (fast) the first year, then the next 3, then the following 5. Over the course of those objectives you'll make mistakes. Methodologies such as "Lean Startup" are meant to provide you with some tools and guidelines to navigate those shallow waters and to prevent you from knocking yourself out of the game permanently. If you're looking for real metrics to evaluate its worth as a guideline, survival rate or financial loss of startups would be more apt indicators. What's the survival rate of startups following patterns laid out by the Lean Startup (or some derivative adaptation, since there are many now) vs survival rate of startups doing things pre-Lean-Startup style?

"Orders of magnitude" are not indicative of success, objectives are. If your goal is to generate $10k of monthly passive income because you want more lifestyle autonomy, I think reaching those numbers qualifies.

As for your question, I think my main criticism regarding the Lean Startup is that much time is spent telling you to "talk to customers", but very little on teaching you how to actually do it. Therefore, I believe that investing some time to learn a proper approach to leads generation, cold outreach, and sales as it's done in the context of a startup would unlock a major achievement in your pursuit of growth (and success).

damn.